The Rural Life (27 page)

L
ast week a tree farmer told me there was only an inch of frost in the ground, which was true when he said it. Now there’s
more, and I’ve set aside plans to dig a hole for the blue spruce I was buying. But I was struck by the common expression—frost
in the ground. It sounds so porous somehow, a web of crystals latticing their way down through the snow and the sod, in among
the Japanese beetle grubs lying in wait for next summer. After bitter nights and a steady hard wind these past few days, the
panes in the windows have been covered with frost. When the sun strikes those windows, the frost melts instantly and the meltwater
evaporates almost as quickly, leaving behind dust prints where there had been drops. It all seems so fragile, so nineteenth
century.

But there’s nothing porous or fragile or antiquated about frost in the ground. It’s the brutalism of winter, a stern, domineering,
eyeless fact. The blowing snow seems harsh, as unforgiving and protean as the wind that drives it. Every morning there are
new contours of overnight drifting, cornices arcing outward from stone outcrops, hollows at the base of trees, unexpected
depths on the smooth downslope of a hillside. Even the sound of the snow underfoot changes from hour to hour. But in the barnyard,
a week of horse traffic has barely knocked the peaks off the mud ridges that formed when the last hard freeze came. People
often compare frost in the ground to iron or steel, but those tend to be people who have never tried to dig a grave for a
dog with a six-foot pry bar in mid-January, as I once did at the pleading of a mournful friend. Frost feels harder than iron
or steel. Not even death is as hard as frost in the ground.

When the frost retreats come spring, in a warm rain or under a hot sun, it will retreat with a load of subterranean stone
in its grasp, creating a thin, horizontal moraine across the pasture, and yet it will leave the beetle grubs where they lie.
But there’s almost nothing you can’t make use of if you put your mind to it, and that includes frost. In late February or
early March, when the snow has melted but the ground is still frozen, I’m going to scatter a mix of red clover and bird’s-foot
trefoil seed over the pasture. This is called frost seeding.

It sounds like a way to sow ice crystals, or a version of the biblical proverb about seed falling on stony ground. But as
the frost relents, the ground expands and contracts and expands again, and the seeds will work their way down into the soil,
where they germinate. It’s an old idea, as old as the weeds along the tree line. Even now the snow is flecked with hundreds
of thousands—perhaps millions—of weed seeds, all waiting for that slow melting ride down to the ground.

T
he horses have strewn a green carpet of hay underfoot, and two crows feed at its edge. The snow has buried nearly everything
in that pasture, but what it hasn’t buried it has thrown into silhouette. The tops of the tallest grasses and weeds protrude
from the whiteness. On sharp days when there has been light wind and a new inch or two, the weed stems cut a V in the snow.
When the wind has been especially strong, the weed tops—their inflorescences—leave a distinctive print, a brushmark, on the
surface.

An abandoned clearing that was full of color in August or June now displays the remnants of only a few plants, stiff, skeletal
forms still bearing seed against the spring. The blankness of the background confers a kind of unaccustomed grandeur on some
of the plants that still stand upright. Burdocks—most grasping, most contemptible of weeds—spread like ancient oaks. Galls
appear like minarets high on a clump of weed stalks. Goldenrods bend as though they were seaweed swayed by a light current.
The ingenuity, the evolutionary virtuosity, of botanical design becomes apparent among the motherwort, a plant with carillon
after carillon of empty, spiny bells surrounding its four-sided stalk.

In late December I feel an almost painful hunger for light. The open woods, bereft of leaves, and the snow itself feel like
a kind of appeasement, a way of making amends to my eye for the almost grudging tread of the sun across the sky. That hunger
is what makes the detail of the natural world so precious now. Pale green lichen on a tree trunk has all the power of a daylily
in bloom. Where moss insulates a south-facing rock outcrop, a few ferns remain May green. The color, like the very plushness
of the moss, seems almost inconceivable.

It’s tempting to think of winter as the negation of life, but life has too many sequences, too many rhythms, to be altogether
quieted by snow and cold. Why are there still leaves on the maple boughs that snapped off in a big storm this autumn? How
does it happen that midges hatch on a day just slightly warmer than the rest of the week? They rise from the brook and follow
its course upstream, into the darkness of a hemlock wood.

A
t our place the horses don’t eat from mangers. They gather at feeding time in a corner of the pasture near the water tank
and the run-in shed, and they take their grain from heavy rubber pans set on the ground. When the horses finish their oats,
they toss the hay out of the feeder and paw the flakes apart, as if they were searching for something in the smell of dried
grass. Sometimes at this time of year it’s hard to tell in the rain and fog where the darkness of day ends and the darkness
of night begins. Mud clings to hooves and boots, and it dries on the horses’ flanks. Now at last the mud has frozen, making
the footing better for everyone. It’s been possible once again to see stars at night and to watch, at feeding time, the sky
dying out in the pale rose of winter.

The manger in which—the story reads—that infant lay so long ago, whose manger was it? Its wood was smoothed, as if in preparation,
by the tongues of animals. In a manger where oats or corn are fed, the softer wood erodes in time and the wood grain appears
to rise, glistening when a cow has just done eating and the planks are still wet. In a manger full of hay, a horse will often
begin to feed at the very center, shaping a hollow, a nest, of grass or alfalfa. But in paintings of the Nativity, the manger
has always been consecrated to another need, and the animals have been displaced, uncomplaining, from their meal. By the time
the Wise Men come from Herod—so again say all the paintings—the manger has reverted to its proper use. The beasts are nose-deep
in their fodder, but they look up, enfolding Magi, mother, and infant in a world where chores are meant to be done, the animals
fed, at the same time every day no matter who comes to visit.

There were eyes that would have been hard to gaze upon that Christmas Eve and Christmas morning many years ago. Fear is what
the shepherds felt when the good news was announced. But in the eyes of their flock and in the eyes of the ox and ass depicted
in every Nativity, there’s the implacable mildness seen even now among the horses when the sun finally warms them. They lie
down in the pasture, in the snow, their legs folded beneath them, and steam begins to rise from their sorrel and bay and rose-gray
backs. Their repose is a sign of confidence, of safety, and it washes over the person who gets to bring them their hay, which
they accept, every morning, as if every morning were Christmas.

T
he next-to-last leg of a long day was the flight from Denver into Casper, Wyoming, and touchdown just at sunset. That flight
restored everything to scale—a slow turboprop plane, more than half empty, the Casper airport, nearly deserted except for
a man and woman in National Guard uniforms with black rifles slung barrel down across their backs. I sat behind the wing,
looking out at the rivets on the trailing edge. The snow-matted thatch of Colorado hovered below, the corridor of tilled and
irrigated ground running north from Denver to Fort Collins and breaking suddenly in the country near the Wyoming line, where
an ocean of short grass spread without interruption to the dark eastern horizon.

I’d spent all day in crowds, at check-in counters, in security lines, in the thigh and elbow crush of viewless airliners.
And now, here at last, coming into Wyoming, was the pure impassioned abstraction of flying once again, the ground subsiding
at takeoff, the occasional sideways skid of the plane on the currents of air, the shuddering and ticking as crosswinds caught
us on the final approach. It felt like a right recovered, a perspective too vital to be curtailed. Long wind-shadows, cast
by haystacks and windbreaks, stretched eastward across the snowy plains. The eastern furrows still held snow in the great
center-pivot circles of irrigated ground, though the western furrows had blown dry. The sinuous trackings of runoff creeks
looked like the insect runes you sometimes see carved just beneath the bark on a round of firewood. The ranch buildings below
had herded together out of the cold wind, into the pale reach of a yardlight.

The last leg was by car in darkness down the long stretch of blacktop that passes westward through Powder River, Moneta, Shoshoni,
and on into Riverton. Snow had piled up along the edges of a railroad shed and in eroded hollows out of the wind, but elsewhere
the snow shone mostly like a version of the moon’s thin light. A coyote stood beside the highway, his coat brush-thick, looking
like a crossing guard with miles and miles of crossings to watch over. The Powder River sign, population 50, seemed to be
exaggerating. Eastbound trucks slung past in the opposite lane, traveling within a self-propelled storm of grit. Cattle had
begun to bed down along the fence lines where hay had been fed.

A winter night can seem almost infinite here under the smooth, cold sky. The last of the day’s heat in the blacktop and the
bare fortifications of rock has long since drifted away. Even the smallest undulations in the open ground, the tightest switches
of grass, look like welcome cover from a wind that, in imagination at least, is always blowing. When you near a town like
Lander, the sense of relief comes not so much from the streetlights, which are hidden until the very last, but from the depth
of the hills, from the willows that encroach on the rivers and creeks, from a gray coppiced look that promises shelter. The
cottonwoods in town have that look too, a witch’s head of bare, tangled branches against the night. The streets lie still
and broad, the houses lit within themselves, the darkness deep and even.